Princeton Anthropologist Claims Biology Nixes Sex Binary

Princeton University anthropologist Agustin Fuentes says sex binary is an anomaly and biological science reveals there are diverse ways of being male, female, or both, and categorizing females as cis women due to the presence of female genitalia may not be appropriate at all.

Photo Insert: Categorizing people into “blue and pink” and abiding by naturalist Charles Darwin’s declaration in 1871 that “man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than women, and has more inventive genius” are flat out wrong.

In an essay for Sapiens anthropology magazine, Fuentes insists that categorizing people into “blue and pink” and abiding by naturalist Charles Darwin’s declaration in 1871 that “man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than women, and has more inventive genius” are flat out wrong.

“Most 19th- and 20th-century evolutionary theories (and theorists) asserted that evolution created two kinds of creatures—male and female—and individuals’ behavior and nature reflected this biological binary…Today a chorus of scientific-sounding claims about blue and pink brains, testosterone, and male primate aggression are offered up as natural explanations for masculine and feminine behavior, along with gaps in pay, jobs, political and economic leadership, and sexuality,” he added.

In politics and law, the belief that biology creates two types of humans is invoked in a range of attempts to mandate and enforce how humans should behave.

“Starting at the most basic level of animal biology, there are multitudes of ways to be female or male or both. The oceans are filled with species of fish that change from one sex to another midlife, and some who change back again. There are invertebrate hermaphrodites and ladies-only lizards who reproduce by recombining their own chromosomes. In some mammals, females are brimming with testosterone and have large ‘penises.’ Among fish and mammals, males do all the caretaking of infants. And in a variety of species, females are authoritarian, promiscuous, and—yes, Darwin—pugnacious,” Fuentes argues.

“Man/woman and masculine/feminine are neither biological terms nor rooted exclusively in biology. Sex, biologically, is not simply defined or uniformly enacted. In humans, having two X chromosomes or an X and a Y chromosome does not create binary bodies, destinies, or lives. If we could crawl into the womb with a fetus at about six to eight weeks of age, we’d see a few clusters of cells in the emerging body get nudges by DNA activity and start to generate new organs, including the clitoris and penis, labia and scrotum, ovaries and testes.”

All genitals are made from the exact same stuff. Since they have a few differing end functions, their final form is different.

But there is a lot of overlap. In fact, of the 140 million babies born last year, at least 280,000 did not fit into a clear penis versus labia model of sex determination. Genitals, hormone levels, and chromosomes are not reliable determinants of sex.

There are, for example, people with XY chromosomes who have female characteristics, people with ambiguous genitalia, and women with testosterone levels outside the typical “female” range. Biologically, there is no simple dichotomy between female and male, Fuentes concluded.

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